“It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look – to affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”  

– Henry David Thoreau

As a student at SAIC, I get free daily admission to the Art Institute of Chicago. Someday feeling like I’ve met the potential of this privilege in my two short years here seems like an impossible task. For one, the Art Institute is huge. The word that comes to mind, if cliche, is labyrinthine. AIC has been building on top of itself for over a hundred years, and while I’m fairly certain I’ve now explored the whole thing, I don’t think I’ll ever actually be certain that I didn’t miss a gallery somewhere. It’s one of those rare buildings where you can truly feel like you’re exploring, rather than navigating, because its age has made its passageways wildly inefficient. You want to get to the Modern Wing from the Michigan St. entrance? You’ll have to cross the train tracks first. 

I find myself going there even when I’m not particularly in the mood to look at art. It is, like far too many museums these days, frightfully devoid of places to sit, but when you do find a rare bench somewhere, the people-watching alone is incredible. Writing, thinking, planning, and reading are also fantastic distractions to take up in those halls, so long as no one is glaring at you for hogging the bench.

Which brings me to this over-researched list. To be clear, these are my top five spots, not my top five artworks (such a list would be long, biased, and overeducated). These are my favorite places in AIC to not just do something, but stand there.

5. The Hulda B. and Maurice L. Rothschild Gallery

Put simply: the photography gallery in the basement, next to where you’ll find the least-crowded restrooms.

These galleries are simple, quiet, and the floors creak beautifully beneath your feet as you wander around. The photos on display are rotated frequently, so it’s a spot even locals can return to whenever one needs a space to think. The benches are huge and seldom occupied, so if you’re really here to hang out instead of looking at art, this might be the best place to do it without being in anyone’s way. There is nowhere you can truly be alone in the Art Institute, at least most days. The beauty of these forgotten galleries, I suppose, is getting to be a part of the crowd without being consumed by it. 

4. The Breathing Statue

The Head of Mars in Gallery 150. 

I’m only slightly joking with the title I’ve given this spot in my head. I discovered this one evening in November. I was spending a beautifully pretentious few hours staring intensely at each of the Greek and Roman statues one by one, and noticed that if you stand very closely to this particular bust, the A/C in the room creates the illusion that the god is breathing on you. 

(This is, otherwise, a fairly unremarkable spot in the museum. There are no benches nearby, but I’ve mastered unabashedly staring at artworks even in rooms you’re supposed to treat like overdecorated thoroughfares.)

Despite being something of a modernist, the Arts of the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Worlds galleries might be my favorite of the whole complex. They’re naturally lit, and you can circle the statues until you feel like you’re in a Jane Austen movie. Nothing feels so quintessentially museum-like as Roman statues, they inevitably inspire some degree of awe. Though I did once see a man point to a statue of Leda and the Swan and shout “Wow! Look at that goose!”

The head of Mars has its nose broken off. The stone is crumbling and stained. I would never have thought so much of it if not for its fortunate proximity to a vent. Despite all this, it’s the one piece here that made me appreciate these statues as truly lifelike. Not just accurate in terms of proportion or emotion or gravitas, but as art that takes on a life of its own in the mere act of being art. Art is not optional for humans. We’ve been making and sharing it for thousands of years. To whatever ancient artisan carved this piece, Mars was a living, breathing force in everyday life, as ubiquitous as air-conditioning. It’s a comforting thought, if not a sensical one. I’ll keep working on it the next time I stand there.

3. The Arts of Europe Galleries

When I say the Art Institute of Chicago is a labyrinth, this is what I mean. The first time I wandered in this direction, I was constantly startled by how this part of the museum just keeps going. Hallways splinter off in every direction, invisible until you stumble on the right corner. It was on my bucket list to see one of Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons, and I couldn’t even find them on the first try. This part of the building is old; the herringbone floorboards have been worn down by decades of footsteps right up the low barriers that keep you from the paintings. If you want to feel like an Intellectual™ while exploring the museum, this is where you go. I especially recommend the bench in front of the El Grecos. 

2. The Monument to Sadness

Like the Breathing Statue, I’ve made up my own names for some spots in the museum. The Monument to Sadness is a two-artwork display against a false wall in Gallery 247. It’s composed of The Girl by the Window by Edvard Munch (the artist-king of agony) and Kneeling Youth by George Minne. There’s a perfectly placed bench for contemplating this scene, and I’m struck by how well the curators did with these two pieces. Even across mediums, the figures mirror each other: hunched over, collapsing inward, emotionally fraught. The wall behind the display is painted blue for good measure. 

This gallery leads directly to the Ferris-Bueller-Scene-Re-Creation-Room (as I’ve named it in my head), so my experience with these works is less beautifully contemplating the human condition and more can you please walk faster and stop blocking my view? but there is of course no right way to explore a museum, so I can’t stay too mad at the tourists. 

Art is meant to make you feel something, but when the crowd moves at that 15-seconds-per-painting pace, it’s hard to really slow down and connect with anything. These two works together are heavy-handed in their imagery, but sometimes that’s what I need. It is art that meets you more than halfway.

1. The Louis Family Gallery

I’ve often repeated the story of how I came to discover curation as an artform and a career. In this self-mythologization, I’m a young teenager and visiting the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. I’ve wandered off from my family, and it feels like I have all the time in the world to explore. I discover a two-painting exhibition titled “American Artists Picture World War II” hanging on a blood red wall somewhere. It’s Norman Rockwell’s Rosie The Riveter next to Janet Sobel’s Hiroshima. The contrast between these two pieces is one of violence: it’s the blinding white-light of American patriotism next to the unimaginable horrors that America has inflicted. The power of curation always comes down to the contrast between two artworks; it’s the understanding that art can do more good together than it can in isolation. Its messages can be amplified, its rhetorics contradicted, its ability to reach you, to spark curiosity or outrage or sadness, enhanced. Through curation, art becomes more than itself.

Gallery 160, the Louis Family Gallery, is the size of a large broom closet. I’m absolutely in love with it. There are exactly two paintings on display in here: Georgia O’Keefe’s Green Mountains, Canada and Kay WalkingStick’s The Silence of Glacier. It is the only exhibition in the Art Institute that might be called modest in its goals. The two pieces abstract the North American landscape, holding what genuinely could be called a conversation between them as I stand there and consider what these two artists are trying to tell me about nature, beauty, and life. Universal Museums, the kind that collect all arts from Roman to Egyptian to Warhol, can drift into the realm of the overwhelming. They have everything, they are everything, and they are trying to give everything to you. It will always be more than you can carry. 

This small gallery convinces me that AIC loves art more than it loves collecting. Even as this place could show you everything, it still has the ability to show you something. You can walk away from here having seen all the wonders of the world, but without having truly absorbed any of it. The Louis Family Gallery will not suffer this: it demands you take a good hard look at what it offers, because there is nothing else here to look at. It will show you the world in just two paintings.

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I don’t want you to think that my love for the Art Institute of Chicago is unambiguous. To become an expert in anything is to take away some of its magic. I love museums. I love art. I love information. I will always cherish the chance to engage with any of these things. But I can never turn off the part of my brain that notices the mismatched label formats, the nail holes left in the wall, the interpretive text that condescends instead of teaches. AIC has all of these things, though in enough moderation that I can forgive them. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve visited this museum in the last nine months, but I still notice new things every time I visit, both big and small, for better and for worse. And I feel somewhat obligated to say that the place suffers all the same problems that any universal museum has. I feel the same about its shortcomings as I do with the Louvre, the British Museum, or the Smithsonian. I don’t need to give that lecture here, because I can also say that AIC succeeds at its main goal: to be a valentine to the human spirit.

This list probably says far more about me than it does about the Art Institute of Chicago. Amy Krause Rosenthal once wrote “for anyone trying to figure out what to do with their life: PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO.” That is certainly what I’ve tried to do at museums (it led me to my entire career after all), not just at the Art Institute, but anywhere that offers so much to me. If this list does sell you on AIC, I do highly advise you to visit these spots, but I would also encourage you to explore random corners, notice things no one else notices, see not just what you get out of the art, but what the art gets out of you.